back to article Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

The weather outside might be frightful, but the fire is... unexpected. Kick off your week with a tale of fan-tastic idiocy courtesy of The Register's Who, Me? feature. Today's tale from Register reader "Mark" takes us back a good few decades to his time spent in the IT support barrel. It was a heady time, and the IT team had …

  1. Korev Silver badge
    Coat

    That's one way to fry your chips...

    1. Shadow Systems

      If it's not fusion...

      Would that be fission chips?

      I'll get my coat. =-D

      1. Someone Else Silver badge

        Re: If it's not fusion...

        Ba-DOOM...tish!

    2. StargateSg7

      Aaaaah What the heck! I will tune into this discussion about frying chips with this 1990's era bit of dodgy gear testing which we PURPOSEFULLY TESTED to a vastly extreme state.

      Picture Northern Canada in a far remote Data Server Farm (which was a rarity in those heady days!) located near an ample supply of CHEAP hydroelectric power but at least 2 to 8 hours of 4x4 Jeep driving time away from the nearest township depending upon the local snow and sleet conditions!

      Picture a series of lunatic sysadmins on a 4 day rotating shift who had nothing better to do than while away MUCH TIME whilst waiting for a bunch of light bulbs to go blip and some speakers to go bleep! Due to a very strict disaster recovery testing regime (i.e. it being a VAAAAST financial trading oriented server farm system!) we were able to partake in finding out what happens when a 400 Kilovolt power line gets tripped at the step-down transform switch side! My wonderfully playful, if idiotic, sysadmin friend had the bright idea to tie a rather large raw ham hock to a electrical shunt bar circuit which takes the brunt of any local power down or over-current scenario.

      IMAGINE what happens when 400 KV (at probably many thousands of AMPS!) shunts over to a solid copper re-routing/shunt bar once a breaker switch is hydraulically levered away from the power source!

      The resulting ARC FLASH roasted an ENTIRE 10 KG worth (25 lbs!) of HAM HOCK in less than half of a second and EXPLODED its many steam-exploded chunks outwards in a radius of probably 30 metres which we picked up over the period of a few steaming minutes. Our early Christmas dinner was now WELL DONE and VERY DELICIOUS!

      Soooooo, while this was not our first try at blowing up various foods with 400 KV worth of Server Farm power-down testing, I do remember that it was definitely one of our most satisfyingly TASTY attempts at ARC FLASH COOKING!

      So if you want to FRY some cpu chips or a ham hock, use that circuit breaker shunt bar and do attach your large turkey, steak, ham hock, old Proscuitto hunk, and even a wheel of cheese to a 400 KV system for your computer system cooking pleasure! Actually....WAIT !!!!.... DO NOT ATTACH the cheese wheel! It chars into an utterly smelly mess of PURE CARBON POWDER which gets everywhere! And carbon BURNS at 500 Celsius+ and you can't exactly pour WATER over a 400 KV electrical system fire!

      There is no moral to this story. It is merely an example of boosting morale under very trying sysadmin circumstances!

      V

      1. MarkET

        Poultry

        That's why we don't allow Turkey's into our control rooms

  2. chivo243 Silver badge
    Windows

    Once

    I let the magic smoke out of the computer. Like a colleague says, it's easy getting the magic smoke out... it's a bugger to get back in!

    1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: Once

      Did you forget to install NOSMOKE.SYS?

      1. G Watty What?

        Re: Once

        Don't forget it's hard dependency SANSFIRE.BAT

  3. tip pc Silver badge

    Always expect th unexpected from users

    People have been trying to use their devices wrong long before the iPhone 4.

    I just don’t comprehend why people think it’s ok to cover things like fans or vent holes. But then perhaps designers could put the, in places where they couldn’t get covered?

    Many older laptops had vents in the hinge area which was great for hiding them and keeping clear from obstruction but not so great for the screen or hinge.

    My Lenovo laptop vents out the side where the power plugs in, always guaranteed some clearance there, and it does vent a lot of heat.

    1. lybad

      Re: Always expect th unexpected from users

      Many modern laptops do it as well - my Huawei Matebook D from last year does it, as do the Asus laptops in the house. All Ryzen 2k or 3k series.

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      A user's ingenuity to find ways to do what he is not supposed to do far surpasses his ability to understand why he should not do it.

      1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
        Happy

        I am so stealing this!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

        Actually, I think this is probably a little unfair; it should rather be "their ability to *realise* why they should not do it."

        Most users would be able understand, if told, that (e.g.) if they block the cooling fan the system will overheat. What they arguably struggle with is realising this sort of thing off their own bat. But then, of course, they are mostly focused on solving the immediate perceived problem, not wondering what constraints their might be on their ideas.

        1. Marcelo Rodrigues
          Facepalm

          Re: ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

          "Most users would be able understand, if told, that (e.g.) if they block the cooling fan the system will overheat."

          Really, I disagree. A user don't have to understand WHY there is a cooler there. But, seriously? Do they really think the company would buy a fan - with all the associated costs of stock, transport, assembling, and whatnot - just for shits and giggles?

          IF there is a fan somewhere, it's because the maker deemed it a justified expense. I DO understand when a user don't get the need of (say) 10cm between the fan and the wall. But "look, a fan! Let's COMPLETELY cover it, buy putting the computer on its side ON CARPET! Yes, that's a excellent idea!"

          No, this kind of thing I cannot understand.

          1. Fading
            Facepalm

            Re: ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

            "Amstrad unfortunately faced a lot of criticism early on in the PC1512's life, with rumours that the models fitted with hard disks were liable to overheating. This turned out to be entirely false - fed by the fact that all other PCs came fitted with cooling fans in the power supply or system unit, and the Amstrad PCs didn't have one. Amstrad were already well known for building "cost-effective" versions of electronic goods, and with this consumers and businesses surmised that perhaps Amstrad cut one too many corners with its PC design in order to keep the prices cheap. In actual fact, the design choice to put the power supply in the monitor was a clever one as it meant the system unit didn't need a fan at all. The rumours got a lot of press, and it was too late to change the minds of the consumer, so Alan Sugar famously gave a press release announcing they would fit a fan to all PC1512 models with a hard disk." - from http://www.retroisle.com/DOSDays/computers/Amstrad%20PC1000/amstrad_pc1000.php

            Sometimes a fan isn't there for cooling :)

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

              Just another Amstrad fanboy?

          2. VicMortimer Silver badge

            Re: ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

            Small space heaters in the US come with a label attached to the cord warning not to use them with an extension cord or power strip, but to only ever connect them directly to an outlet. It specifically warns of fire risk. The label also has a warning not to remove the label. It's placed very near the plug end of the cord.

            The labels rarely get removed. But I frequently had to unplug heaters from power strips, and have even found a few connected to under desk UPSs.

            The second time I had to do that for a particular user, I'd confiscate the heater until the user got a lecture.

            (And no, the offices were almost never actually cold. But if it wasn't heated to 80F the users frequently claimed to be. Yes, many users would run the heater in the summer while large amounts of money was being spent to cool the office to a habitable temperature.)

            1. ridley

              Re: ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

              Don't ask me how I know but you shouldn't use an old steel Mini wheel as something to wind your very long extension lead round.

              Well not if you then decide to power a heater with the ext cord and cannot be bothered to unwind it all first...

      3. swm

        In the old days there was a write permit ring that had to be inserted to write the tape. Removing the write permit ring protected the contents of the tape. But operators faced with the error "no write permit ring" would just insert one thereby overwriting the master tape or worse.

        So there was a special slotted ring that could be bolted on the tape reel to prevent the insertion of the write permit ring. Still some enterprising operators would find some tool to remove this ring and insert a write permit ring.

        It did make the error go away and was simpler than mounting the correct tape.

    3. CountCadaver Silver badge

      Re: Always expect th unexpected from users

      As a student I left a space next to my laptop while I went out to work (where the fan and power cord were) my mum put a hardback book RIGHT against the vent, came back to the fan screaming its head right off and the keyboard red hot. Surprised it didn't kill the laptop tbh, my dad's response "shouldn't be leaving stuff on, could cause fires and run up ma electrical bill" (he being of the generation convinced anything with a fan in it is "sore on the electric" as it moves, and moving stuff must use a fortune...... (while having umpteen table lamps and a 9.5Kw shower running for 2 odd hours a day.....)

    4. Bruce Ordway

      Re: Always expect th unexpected from users

      >> why people think it’s ok to cover things like fans or vent holes.

      Not computer related, just reminded me of a "e" vent from the past.

      My friend was remodeling his house (100 years, very old for this part of the US).

      Everything was fine until winter came.

      Whenever the heat kicked on, the whole house felt like it was shaking apart.

      I finally noticed he'd covered a vent in the living room with new flooring.

      Turned out that old vent was actually the source of the intake air for the old heater (not to code).

      After ripping a square thru that new flooring and returning the old vent cover, no more shaking.

      Eventually, when that old heater had to be replaced, a proper intake vent was put in place.

  4. Andytug

    Even worse with heaters...

    …~~~wavy lines~~

    Back in the day when the office had lovely white plastic-cased Fujisu PCs, for the important people only.

    One Important Person was cold, and placed a fan heater on top of their desk, on a box. Then went to the toilet for some time, during which the heater fell forwards.....on to the PC base, blowing right on it. The result looked like Mr Soft's (from the Softmints advert) PC, only the internal metal casing stopped the whole thing from flowing off the desk like lava. Very lucky not to cause a fire.

    1. Caver_Dave Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: Even worse with heaters...

      I worked for a while in an International Haulage company for a few years. Their offices at the remote sites tended to be porta cabins next to the open yards. I saw at least 2 melted boxes as described above and my home monitor had a slightly melted corner and had been thrown out by the company.

      Icon - could it be anything else for this story?

      1. Muscleguy

        Re: Even worse with heaters...

        i volunteer in a charity shop. We have pricing guns. There’s a wall mounted fan heater behind the counter for the more elderly volunteers with a stool you can sit on in front of it.

        Someone left the pricing gun on the stool while the heater was on high. It never worked again. We operated for several weeks with one pricing gun. Margins are tight and buying a new pricing gun is not an easy thing.

        Took me 6 months to be confident of reloading the things with sticker rolls. Get a loose sticker inside it and big trouble ensues.

    2. diguz

      Re: Even worse with heaters...

      this reminds me of the secretary that worked at the last company i worked for... she was always cold, so the boss gave her a heater, an electric radiator one.

      She always used it under her desk, to keep her legs warm, until the day the plastic coating of said desk started melting and the whole office had to be cleared for half an hour (in february!) to let the smell get out. Fortunately i had my new car whose climate control worked perfectly.

    3. ICPurvis47
      Facepalm

      Re: Even worse with heaters...

      One of the engineers in the department in which I was a _very_ junior engineer decided that the departmental fridge needed defrosting (no auto-defrost in those days). He opened the door and emptied the milk, sandwiches, and other disgusting green objects from within and propped a fan heater up at an angle so it blew hot air into the fridge. He then went home for lunch. Some time later, our Section Leader went in to get his sandwiches and make himself a cuppa, and let out an anguished yelp. The hot air had done its job melting the frost, but had also caused the blow moulded inner lining to shrink back towards its original, flat, un-blow-moulded shape. Only the glass shelves had prevented it from going all the way, but the internal capacity was severely reduced, and said shelves could no longer be removed for cleaning. The fridge still worked OK, but the culprit was banned from going near it in future.

    4. Rob Daglish

      Re: Even worse with heaters...

      I got a call to a school one day as the scanner "had black marks over all of our scans that aren't on the paper". I turned up to a freezing cold computer room, and a scanner with a melted front end letting loads of light in. A small investigation on my part found that the first thing the scanner did was put a message on screen to say "Lamp Warming Up - Please Wait" which could be on for anything up to a few minutes (this was 20+ years ago). Once it did that, it started to scan fine. In an effort to reduce the time taken to warm up the lamp, an enterprising teacher had placed a fan heater right next to the scanner where the lamp was. There was, of course, no mention of this, or the hole in the case it had caused in the phone call, just an expectation that I'd change the scanner under warranty...

      1. nintendoeats

        Re: Even worse with heaters...

        Did you?

    5. grumpymike80
      Flame

      Re: Even worse with heaters...

      In my workplace, we repair computers, printers etc etc from a number of high street retailers. It would seem that a number of folk who work in these establishments are nesh buggers, and plop a heater under their desk / till furniture. We get many melty pcs and printers - even the occasional monitor. No amount of charging for spare parts seems to stop em.

  5. Chris G

    Manglement

    It never ceases to amaze me, the things they manage to think of, or perhaps thought is not actually involved.

    At one job, I had a brilliant suggestion from the senior manager that we should replace all of our machinery every 18 months (the standard warranty period for our commercial kit at the time), his reasoning being we could halve the maintenance engineer staff and just claim warrnty.

    I suggested he should go and read any random Ts&Cs for an item of kit. The company was a grounds maintenance contractor and he genuinely thought that a warranty would be paid if one of the guys drove over a piece of kit with a tractor.

    In his defence, he had an MBA and had been a local council technical officer, so had no experience of proper work.

    1. TonyJ

      Re: Manglement

      "...In his defence, he had an MBA and had been a local council technical officer, so had no experience of proper work..."

      Seems somewhat harsh! I bet he thoroughly enjoyed hard work. Watching others do it, that is...

  6. Sequin

    A neighbour once asked me to look at her laptop, which kept cutting out. A couple of minutes investigation showed that the thing got very hot before shutting itself off. Suspecting a faulty fan I turned it over to find that the fan vents were all clogged with a brown sticky substance. Long experience in bar work in my younger days led me to imediately identify this as tar and nicotine from cigarette smoke. She and her partner would sit at the laptop for hours on end, surfing the web and chain smoking tabs. The reult was absolutely disgusting.

    Ten minutes scrubbing with alcohol wipes and a stiff paintbrush fixed the problem.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      I think I'd have been inclined to tell them that the goo from their smoking had ruined it beyond repair.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It is official Apple policy that service can be refused if gear even smells like smoke, as a safety issue for the technicians. I suspect many other manufacturers have the same policy these days.

        I'll usually fix it anyway, but there's no way I'm scrubbing a fan, client gets to buy a new one.

    2. Dabooka
      Thumb Up

      You from up North ?

      Only place i know that calls 'em tabs

      1. Charlie van Becelaere

        Re: You from up North ?

        I wondered about that as well.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      A very long time ago, I worked for a small architect, doing drafting part of the time and IT stuff the rest of the time. The founder of the company, in his 80s, still came to work every day, and chain-smoked from 8AM to 5PM. His main role was to run an extremely ancient program that generated architectural specifications. It ran on a late-80s vintage 80386 white-box PC, and wouldn't run on anything else. It ran in DOS; the computer didn't have Windows of any kind on it. This was 2000, by the way. It had a single 3.5" floppy drive and some tiny hard drive. The entire area was covered with yellow stains and cigarette ashes; the keyboard was covered with burns where he'd obviously put his cigarettes down for a few minutes while he did some other task. Also interestingly, the system he used was, at one time, linked by serial cable to a Laserdisc player. The discs contained thousands of pictures of various architectural things, from bricks to toilet paper dispensers. You could, with this system, specify a certain brick to be used in a project, and it would show still images from the Laserdisc of what you'd picked.

    4. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Ten minutes scrubbing with alcohol wipes and a stiff paintbrush

      That's a very effective way of getting them to kick the habit, I might have gone for the old style floor scrubber as frequently used by a Mrs H Ogden* of Coronation Street, Weatherfield.

      Icon - Old scrubber.

    5. Cheshire Cat

      Place I used to work for used to provide IT support for Imperial Tobacco. In those days, office staff were not only allowed to smoke in the office, but were encouraged to do so by the supply of free cigs.

      Taking the top off a PC to identify the cause of failure was disgusting - thick dust over all components. Nobody seemed to make the connection between the condition of their PC and the likely condition of their lungs, though.

      1. First Light

        That was probably back in the days when they were claiming tobacco didn't cause cancer (although they knew otherwise).

        1. FuzzyTheBear
          Joke

          It don't !

          Tobacco dosen't cause cancer and they were right .. i can look at it .. shuffle it and do a million things with it and dont get cancer .. it's smoking it that does .. not the same thing ;) Merry Christmas :D

  7. big_D Silver badge

    Site services...

    Our helpdesk was reorganized. The desks moved around and the tanks in the floor with the power and networking along with them. These plugged into a power rail and only plugged in one way... At least in theory.

    Somehow the site services guy managed to rotate the box 90° and wedge it in place. So, now, life = neutral, earth = live and neutral = earth...

    I plugged my PC back in and flicked the (hardware) power switch. BANG a 12" long spark shot out the back of the PSU and everything went dead! Unfortunately, I had turned the PC on first, not the dodgy old monitor I wanted replacing... Hey ho.

    Another time, in Germany, I had a similar problem. The German sockets are similar to the UK ones, in that the Earth connector connects first as the plug is pushed into the socket. All very good and safety conscious. The German system, however, has the earth connectors standing proud in the socket. You can actually touch them. They are great for working on electronics, you attach your anti-static wristband direct to the earth prongs.

    I was standing in my office and leaning against the wall, I then leant forward and lost my balance. I reached out behind me and managed to stick my fingers in the socket to save me. My left hand touched the earth prong, no problems. My right hand followed and BAM! The electrician that had wired up the sockets had switched the phase and earth on that socket! All the other sockets were correct, just this one was wrong and, in over 15 years of use, nobody had ever plugged anything into that socket!

    1. TonyJ

      Re: Site services...

      "...I plugged my PC back in and flicked the (hardware) power switch. BANG a 12" long spark shot out the back of the PSU and everything went dead! Unfortunately, I had turned the PC on first, not the dodgy old monitor I wanted replacing... Hey ho..."

      Nope, sorry.

      I don't argue that it maybe flashed and went bang as well as made you jump and in your own mind it would've seemed like it did what you describe, but really...it didn't. To create an arc isn't actually that easy over anything other than small gaps and tends to require a combination of high voltage and/or high frequency.

      Besides, trying to work through your 90 degree change suggests L and N were switched which wouldn't cause a bang. L to E should've tripped an RCD (they've been a thing for a long time now) but in this case the E from the supply was going to the L of the PC so I am really struggling to fact check this one but it feels like it's grown in your mind over the years, sorry.

      Happy to be corrected, here.

      1. Andytug

        I've seen a spark like that from an old twin tub washer..

        which a friend has asked me to look at as "the fuse had gone". Took the back off, new fuse, switched plug on and fizzbang, large spark, fuse gone again. Get someone who knows what they're doing please, I'm out.

        Although you are correct that to make an arc in dry air needs 3kV per cm, etc, the presence of dust, metal debris or anything else flying about can make for a larger (if only briefly) spark (I used to make good "fireworks" with a 13V supply as a kid, due to tiny metal bits flying off glowing). Also the image left burned on your retina will probably be larger.....

        1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
          Unhappy

          Re: I've seen a spark like that from an old twin tub washer..

          Also bear in mind that vaporised copper makes an excellent conductive plasma. I've been unfortunate enough to see it wipe out an entire cabinet in a printing press.

          I had the flash burns and missing eyebrows to prove it!

          P.S. Admittedly that was from a 3 phase supply.

      2. IanRS

        Re: Site services...

        Might have been a flame rather than a spark. Sparks normally have something at the other end to complete the circuit. (As this place is pedant infected, yes, I do know about cloud to cloud lightning). I had a PC back in the early 90s which I had unplugged to plug in something else temporarily. When I turned the PC on nothing happened. Oh yes, the plug. Reach under the desk to plug it back in, putting my head next to the PC case, and a flash of flame goes past my face. There went the main house fuse, the ring circuit breaker, the plug fuse and the PSU fuse. Further inspection of the inside of the PSU revealed a large ceramic (maybe tantalum bead) capacitor with a crater in one side.

        1. Trixr

          Re: Site services...

          Yep, when we were first trialling site-based hardware support for Dells and sat there eyeballing the first poor tech that turned up to replace a PSU (still in the shipped-from-US packaging) and forgot to check the voltage selector switch, the big bang was a bang all right, but what made the fireworks was a very brief burst of flame.

    2. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge

      Re: Site services...

      You are confusing the French (E) and German (F) power sockets...

      https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Site services...

        No, definitely type F, with the earth prongs sticking out. I should know, I've lived here in Germany for nearly 20 years.

        1. Cynic_999

          Re: Site services...

          Type F *with the earth prong sticking out* would appear to be type E

          1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

            Re: Site services...

            Please not the "s" indicating plural in "prongs", making it type F. A singular prong would make it type "E".

            1. AlbertH
              Coat

              Re: Site services...

              Just remember....

              Two prongs don't make a write!

          2. big_D Silver badge

            Re: Site services...

            As A.P.Veening says, prongs, top and bottom of the socket. The type E has a single prong / nubbin in the middle of the socket.

            If you take a look at the link Strahd Ivarius posted, you can see the two metal prongs on the Type F.

  8. A K Stiles
    Coat

    Cold breeze

    It's strange how folks that log helpdesk calls for the computer causing a (depending on the season) warm/cold breeze across their ankles don't really appreciate a response that consists of one word: "Socks".

    1. Peter Prof Fox

      Re: Cold breeze

      Sorry to educate you:

      Some people have chronic poor circulation. It's not at all rare. 'Socks' is like shouting louder to a deaf person. At this very moment I have my feet on a 200w tubular heater driven through a dimmer switch. The soles of my feet are now warm but my knees are icy. I might have to set the 650w 'silent' fan heater going.

      1. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

        Re: Cold breeze

        Electric socks.

        1. First Light

          Re: Cold breeze

          Or a chihuahua.

          1. Shooter
            Thumb Up

            Re: Chihuahuas

            Can confirm. I have three, various sizes.

      2. Trixr

        Re: Cold breeze

        Heated lap blanket - much more efficient than dumping all that radiant heat into the air, and much less power-consuming.

    2. Paul Herber Silver badge

      Re: Cold breeze

      Socks? With sandals? Fashion crime (yeah, I know, as if that matters to a computer user)!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cold breeze

        std issue along with a pony tail amongst Linux engineers

        1. Aussie Doc
          Pint

          Re: Cold breeze

          Oi! As a bearded, ponytailed old hippy, I resemble that remark.

          Christmas day here in Oz - Merry one everybody.

          Stay safe and well.

      2. TomPhan

        Re: Cold breeze

        Standard dress for the Pacific northwest.

      3. Anonymous IV
        IT Angle

        Re: Cold breeze

        Sandals are simply shoes with a little extra ventilation.

        Socks with shoes are entirely acceptable.

        So should be socks with sandals.

        Surely it's a bigger crime for Australians to call beach sandals "thongs".

        And New Zealanders to call them "jandals" (supposedly short for Japanese sandals).

        1. murrby

          Re: Cold breeze

          Jandals is a brand name

          1. Trixr

            Re: Cold breeze

            ...which was made up from "Japanese sandals". So, sure, it's always been a trademarked name, but that's how the founders came up with it.

  9. John Riddoch

    Only once

    Only ever had issues with cooling once - a PC I'd self assembled many years ago and hadn't put enough thermal paste on the CPU. ISTR it was an AMD Athlon, so probably about 20 years ago... It kept freezing on me and took me a while to figure out the problem and a few iterations of taking it to bits, putting on paste, cleaning heatsinks of dust, upgrading fans etc before it got stable again. Good cooling is very important to the correct functioning of computers I learned from that...

    1. Chris G

      Re: Only once

      It kept freezing on you so you made sure it stayed cool.

      Isn't the English language odd?

      1. Dave314159ggggdffsdds Silver badge

        Re: Only once

        If the temperature in your fridge is too high, you should turn the fridge _up_...

        1. Kubla Cant

          Re: Only once

          It's not just a language thing. If a rotary control thinks it's a rheostat, it turns clockwise to increase stuff. If it thinks it's a tap, it turns anticlockwise to open*. Why didn't the first rheostats mimic taps? And why are phone keypads the opposite layout to calculators and computers?

          * At least, that's what I thought until I had a new basin mixer installed recently. But the left-hand tap opens clockwise. It turns out that it's designed for both lever tops, where this arrangement makes sense, and capstan tops, where it confuses.

          1. Irony Deficient

            Re: Only once

            And why are phone keypads the opposite layout to calculators and computers?

            See here, though “Bell Labs” probably would have been more precise than “AT&T (…)” in the second reason given there.

            1. Yes Me Silver badge
              Headmaster

              Re: Only once

              And I have to remind our regular readers that some dial telephones went 1234567890 and others went 9876543210.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Only once

                That has me stumped. I understand 1234567890 as that's the number of pulses it sends (10 for a zero as zero pulses won't really do anything). A mechanical solution to encoding the numbers sent to the exchange in a way the mechanical switches at the other end could handle.

                9876543210 is baffling to me though.

        2. swm

          Re: Only once

          If something is too hot you blow on it to cool it down. If something is too cold you blow on it to heat it up. (Something told to a small child.)

        3. Paul Cooper

          Re: Only once

          If the temperature in your fridge is too high, you should turn the fridge _up_...

          And in Hong Kong, you turn the thermostat UP to save electricity....

      2. gratou

        Re: Only once

        And the alarm goes off when it triggers. Stupid language it tell you...

    2. nintendoeats

      Re: Only once

      Similar case; I recently nabbed a full Duron motherboard from a thriftstore with CPU/Cooler/RAM. Hooked it all up, worked first time, very excited. After a few minutes, dies. I think I'm lucky, this was pretty early for thermal cutoffs.

      Pump effect my arse, that thermal paste was completely dried out.

  10. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    I did once blow up a 80287 co-processor inserted in the image processing "workstation", inserted there by our supplier. When I opened the case to inspect the damage, I noted the lettering on the chip: 80287-10, indicating it was a 10 MHz part inserted in a 12 MHz machine. Not a massive degree of unintentional over-clocking, but enough to fry the part after some time. I complained about the issue, and the company in question first stated I was wrong, after which I gave them my copy of the Intel data sheet on said component. I got an 80287-12 as replacement after that.

    I actually inserted a home-made, hand soldered ISA-bus board to control both the exposure time on our cameras and the shutters on the fluorescence and phase contrast light sources on our microscopes. Switching the computer on after installing the experimental board was quite scary, but nothing shorted. Much to my surprise, it worked straight away (once my heart rate was back to something approaching normal)

    1. nintendoeats

      I presume that because you did that, the computer it was in continued to be used for another 20 years.

    2. Bitsminer Silver badge

      I once had an 8080 microprocessor explode on me.

      It was the older white ceramic package with gold tin sealing the chip compartment.

      I was debugging the firmware on the system with the cover open and it just randomly popped it's tin lid off in my general direction, with an audible pop, and started smoking.

      We all wore safety glasses for a week afterwards. Then not.

      1. David Hicklin Bronze badge

        Two lots of exploding kit:

        First was a kit built disco sound to light unit, worked fine when switched on. however it had 5 outputs each with a level control, and when channel 3 was increased there was a range that caused the 2nd channel to come on as well.

        So I started to poke around with a scope using the thin screwdriver with the scope clipped to it as a 'probe'. All was well until the screwdriver touched a triac heatsink which was mains voltage...glowing blobs raced around the PCB tracks and every IC it reached (there was a lot of TTL logic) blew it's casing off. Actually managed to repair the damage and got it working again.

        2nd was a valve powered oscilloscope which has a 110/220 V mains selector switch, no instructions and it was not clear which way was which....you can probably guess what's coming - was treated to a firework display of sparks as the HT flashed over.

        After replacing some valves this amazingly also worked again

    3. Trixr

      I wonder how "unintentional" it was and how much it was due to a manufacturer trying to save a few cents per unit on an underspecced part.

      It's amazing how even a top-class vendor like HP can _mistakenly_ misassemble enterprise-class servers that have been specified down to each part number.

      Actually, I don't really think HP do such idiocies deliberately, but I wouldn't necessarily say the same about all points of their supply chain, or their resellers, or that of any major vendors. Smaller vendors, well, who knows. And in the past, things were often more dodgy.

      Then you have outright major fraud, such as the huge problem that was uncovered with fake "certified" aircraft parts a number of years ago (which is still a lingering problem in the industry).

    4. DropBear

      Did the custom ISA card thing too, and the pucker factor is notable indeed; but probably the scariest was turning on my ZX Speccy clone after plugging my hand-made Kempston interface in. Even the straight-to-PCB connector was hand-crafted (wouldn't even dream of where I might buy one back then), and you were connecting straight to the CPU's address and data bus: short/load/drive it wrong, and your precious, too-expensive-to-replace machine is now a brick. Well, apparently the Magic Smoke Gods were smiling upon me that day...

  11. ColinPa

    Keeping the windows open at Christmas

    Not entirely on topic.

    One Christmas lunch we were about to have the Christmas pudding with all the trimmings, when someone said "I can smell smoke". We went into the kitchen and found it full of smoke, coming from the microwave.

    I managed to get it outside. We had to open all the windows on the ground floor to get the smell and smoke out - so we sat there is coats and woolly hats. Someone asked where the custard was - there was a long pause then my Mother In Law said "Ah ... it was in the microwave". She had put the microwave on for 40 minutes instead of 4 minutes, and melted the plastic pot and the contents.

    1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      Re: Keeping the windows open at Christmas

      I,have a brown microwave oven. Before I misjudged heating a fish potato pie, it was a white microwave oven (inside).

  12. MisterHappy
    Facepalm

    Longer cables to the rescue

    Had a fun call raised many years ago. A particular PC would blow the PSU but nobody could work out the cause. The PC in question was located in the prosthetics workshop & the obvious cause was dust from the foam moulds that were sanded down to fit the recipient, but every time the PC came back it was perfectly clean, no dust coating the motherboard or clogging up the PSU. The PSU was replaced & failed a few weeks later, the PC was replaced & the new PC failed. This went on for a couple of months until one of the team was attending a different fault in the area & popped into the workshop to see if everything was ok.

    In his words "The whole thing was covered in yellow dust!" A little digging revealed that when the PC failed the process was to give it a good clean, inside and out, with the vacuum & try it again, this would usually work but when it didn't it got logged with IT. Hence the PC being returned looking spotless despite having been under a pile of dust.

    The solution was to put the PC in the office on the other side of the wall & run cables for keyboard, mouse & monitor through the wall.

  13. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

    Let the magic smoke out.... keep yer dick in a vice ;-)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Skookum!

  14. disgruntled yank

    Smoke, no fire

    Back in the days of minicomputers, one of our customers got his MV/x000 to smoke by misconnecting the priority chain on the backplane. Our guy had an arm in a sling, and couldn't do the connecting. They cut the power immediately and the machine was not damaged.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    WD40

    A previous colleague of mine, who I shall refer to as Bruce, once decided that the best solution to a PC with a seized PSU fan was to squirt WD40 into it to loosen it up. Unfortunately he did this after it had been on for a few minutes. The resultant blast of flame out of the back was quite impressive. I can't recall if the fan moved again afterwards.

    1. cookieMonster Silver badge

      Re: WD40

      I’d imagine something else moved thought.

    2. Electronics'R'Us
      Devil

      Re: WD40

      Many years ago when I was at (what was) RNAS Portland I was working in the electronics repair workshop for a while.

      In the summer we were plagued by large flies (particularly in the crewroom, probably because of the presence of sugar and other assorted snacks).

      Some of the crew used to get the cans of WD40 with the tubes fitted and they made pretty good miniature flamethrowers although the fly remnants were sometimes difficult to remove.

  16. trevorde Silver badge

    Fire hazard

    Once took a support call from a timber mill that their SCADA PC was getting a bit 'unreliable'. It was an ancient DOS based 286 which had been their since the dawn of time, so it was probably due for replacement anyway. Got to site and popped open the case to find it was packed full of sawdust! Duly vacuumed it all out, reseated all the cards for good measure and it sprang back to life. AFAIK, it is still running to this day and will keep running to the end of time (given a regular vacuuming!).

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      Re: Fire hazard

      Yep. I used to get a call from a local stonemason every six months or so to give his office PC a clean out. Sawdust is nothing to Stone dust. Add a bit of water and the stuff sets rock hard.

      Eventually, I persuaded them to put said PC inside a cabinet that was screwed to the outside wall, A 4in hole in the wall and some flexible tube solved the issue or so I thought.

      Three months later the PC fried due to water ingress. The Boss of the next door business decided to use a pressure washer on his car that was parked right next to said hole in the wall.

      Now the hole is 2m off the ground.

      1. fobobob

        Re: Fire hazard

        A slight one-up - the warehouse inventory computer at a custom bolt+fastener shop. Metallic dust that I vacuumed as best I could, but otherwise didn't want to mess with. Was working on a software issue, though provided a similar solution: put the tower inside of a large cabinet to minimize the death-glitter incursion.

        1. J. Cook Silver badge

          Re: Fire hazard

          heh. Had a contract job back around '02 cleaning Code Red/Nimda off a bunch of machines at the local offices of a multi-national aerospace company. We were given burned CDs with the removal tools on them, and told to flag anything that wouldn't clear for their regular IT staff to deal with.

          Had to skip the entire machine floor, because the cd-rom drives on the networked CNC mill controllers were trashed from titanium dust and cutting fluid. (The rest of the machine had filters on the fan inlets. Go figure.) Big CNC machines costing near to a million US pesos, carving up blocks of titanium costing more than a Cadillac, dead-lined by a failed $50 CD-ROM drive on a $700 computer.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Concrete

        Seen one just like that. Concrete used to make kerbs and similar slabs for the roads. Office was on the opposite end of a large barn.

        First time I opened that case it was all 2 inches deep in the finest dust you have ever seen.

        That one would eat hard disks as the dust was fine enough to get into the breathe holes. Built it a cabinet under the desk to attempt to hide the machine more. Hate to think of the state of the lungs of the poor guys who worked there!

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Literal infernal modem

    I had to install an internal modem in a tower system kept under a desk a a branch office. While being young and eager, I was still experienced enough to know that closing the computer cover too soon guarantees the machine will never work, so left the cover off. I switched it on, and saw smoke curling from the newly-installed modem. I discovered what could be a new Olympic sport: leaping in a single bound from a crouched position to the fire extinguisher on the far wall, underpants mostly intact. Fortunately switching off the power resolved the potential inferno. It made me grateful to follow the "don't close the case too soon" rule.

  18. Johnny Canuck

    xorg.conf

    I discovered you could overdrive a monitor by editing xorg.conf in Linux (I think it was an early version of Red Hat Linux). This made a nice snap sound accompanied by flames shooting out the top vents of the monitor. Heh, good times.

    1. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: xorg.conf

      > editing xorg.conf

      Before EDID and all that auto-configure magic, you had to calculate the dot clock line for your particular monitor and graphics card. This was a line that described the timings and resolution for the display.

      And yes, if you screwed it up, it would kill the monitor. Since a nice Sony Multisync was a big wodge of change, you checked the calculation about a dozen times before actually trying it.

      Nowadays, you just cable shit up and turn it on, and it just works.

      1. H in The Hague

        Re: xorg.conf

        "Nowadays, you just cable shit up and turn it on, and it just works."

        Sometimes.

      2. Chris G

        Re: xorg.conf

        "Nowadays, you just cable shit up and turn it on, and it just works."

        Until it doesn't!

        1. J. Cook Silver badge

          Re: xorg.conf

          And it's really fun when the box is a gaming console with a very obscure and finicky process to boot it into 'safe' mode... (PROTIP: Use quality HDMI cables, yo. cheap ones have a tendancy to fail in stupid ways....)

    2. AlbertH

      Re: xorg.conf

      A variant of the TRS80 had a built-in EPROM blower. The address range over which the blower would work could be changed in software..... It was fun to point the EPROM blower at either the RAM or the system ROM - either would result in clouds of expensive smoke and a totally destroyed machine! Of course it could be done from TRS80 BASIC, so a trip to Tandy could result in a couple of smoking machines a few seconds after you'd left the shop!

  19. Caver_Dave Silver badge
    Flame

    Orange LED

    I used to work at an industrial bus board manufacturer - the sort of boards where the latest fandangle (hot) processors were put into ridiculously tiny metal frames and made to work without cooling.

    We used to have fun clapping when the power was first switched on to a new board and other such antics to worry the developer of that board. However, the time I will recall was a little different.

    'Mike' was turning on a 5V supply only board and that meant it was designed to pull 7 or 8 amps from the PSU. Nobody messed around at the turning on as this board was quite a big deal. But, nothing seemed to happen except that the bright orange LED next to the backplane seemed very bright. It took him a couple of seconds to remember that there wasn't an orange LED on that board, and he turned it off. He had one of the high current traces connecting the 5V and Ground and it was glowing very hot. That this hadn't tripped the industrial racks' PSU has us all being a little more wary in the future.

    1. RichardBarrell

      Re: Orange LED

      There wasn't an orange LED on that board, but there was an orange LER. :)

      1. Adrian 4

        Re: Orange LED

        Not all diodes are *intended* to emit light.

        And then there's the smoke-emitting-diodes.

        1. Robert Moore
          Pint

          Re: Orange LED

          All diodes can be light emitting... Briefly.

      2. ttlanhil

        Re: Orange LED

        Diodes mean the power can only go one way - and sure enough, after it got turned into a pretty colour, the electricity didn't go back!

  20. sitta_europea Silver badge

    ** Address not found **

    Your message wasn't delivered to whome@theregister.com because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail.

    The response was:

    The account xxx@xxxxxxxxxxxx.xx.xx is disabled.

  21. fobobob

    Power supply fan

    Had a power supply fan that was making a noise, and I kept putting off replacing it... one day, I guess it seized (never checked, but the assumption seems reasonable), and the other fan in the front of the case was moving just enough air to draft the blue-white smoke from the PSU's internal immolation out the back. Computer stayed running up until I shut it off at the power strip.

    1. MCMLXV
      Thumb Up

      Re: Power supply fan

      +1 for "internal immolation"

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Power supply fan

      Power supplies and flames still happen. Very anon message this one as this happened last week. Client using old Core2 Duo PC with old cheapo power supply from second hand guy down the road. "A bargain" claimed my client when I saw the machine last a few years back.

      Various power splitters inside to convert molex to a pair of SATA power. PC not been used in ages, then moved to a new location and plugged in. Then rapidly unplugged again when the flames are spotted from the inside. The SATA connector had caught light!

      HOW does a SATA connector catch light?!?! Full on flames and melting plastic mess.

      Still don't know how this happened. Client denies everything when I was handed the PC last week to look at. Maybe damp as I can see rusty screws? Maybe just junk power supply and bad splitters. Melted drive at the data recovery specialists now...

  22. martinusher Silver badge

    Laptops?

    One of the problems with using a laptop on your lap, especially if you're sitting in bed or somewhere else cosy, is all those little grille things get covered up. The machine gets a bit warm; it probably won't stop because of clock throttling but the GPU is likely to be unaware of the need for (low) speed.

    Incidentally, I -- someone who should know better -- have done this with a tower system. I didn't do anything quite as silly but rather sat the thing on a carpet which blocked the air vents at the bottom. It cost me a power supply.

    1. Trygve Henriksen

      Re: Laptops?

      No serious manufacturer calls them Laptop any more. They don't want a lawsuit when some scmuck fries his wedding tackle...

    2. Trixr

      Re: Laptops?

      this is why I have a hollow wedge-shaped laptop rest that has a grille on top for air flow, while the bottom of the wedge is solid with a neoprene backing for lap comfort. Back of the wedge is a few cm high, so it has the benefit of making a level surface for typing as well.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Computer Literacy

    Not a fire story as such, but donkey's years ago - when computers were making their way into businesses (well, the one I worked for) - it was time for my then manager to get one on his desk.

    Up until this point, we had secretaries, and managers would laboriously hand write memos and reports to be typed up, and these would spend anything up to several weeks being passed back and forth until they had been corrected sufficiently (or the manager had finished/got fed up with making changes) that they could be sent out.

    The manager in question was by no means unique, but I remember he went on a managers' course to learn how to use this new-fangled contraption. And I burst out laughing when he brought back a huge fold-out keyboard image so he could learn where all the letters were.

    Then there was the woman who I had to show 'how to use the scanner'. She was a scientist, albeit close to retirement, and her job was to write Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for the factory. This meant butchering manufacturers' manuals for images (or sometimes photocopies of them - but not always) and gluing or taping them on to pages for duplicating and distribution.

    Actually getting her to be able to scan the manuals was a challenge in itself. But we got there eventually. Or so I thought.

    I walked into the office one day and she was butchering a copy of the manual she had successfully scanned, then successfully printed out... and was sticking the bits on to sheets of paper again!

    I got in trouble for laughing over that one.

    1. Yes Me Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Computer Literacy

      And I burst out laughing when he brought back a huge fold-out keyboard image so he could learn where all the letters were.

      This was a problem where I worked when the IBM PC first came out. IBM seeded the market by giving them away free to about 20 managers. In them days managers were all men, and men (at least in Europe) naturally enough didn't know how to type, because that was women's work. We male techies sort of knew how to pick out letters, because we'd used Teletypes, or VT05s, or even a 129 card punch when we couldn't find a "punch girl" to do it for us. But the PCs went to managers, who didn't have the slightest idea what to use them for, but it made them feel really important.

      Icon, because she's an old-fashioned girl.

      1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: Computer Literacy

        My most precious gift in my 1970s pre-teens was a journalist typewriter I got for my 8th birthday. I was touch-typing within months.

  24. Ozan

    Fine times of old CPUs. My Brother successfully burned his AMD CPU and then took my CPU and burned it as well. He had to buy all new computer.

  25. Lazlo Woodbine

    Reminds me of my college days

    My college got a shiny new IT suite when I was doing my HNC, 20 lovely beige boxes, all lined up on a long bench.

    Each box had a vent on the left and a fan on the right, so cold air in one side, and hot out the other.

    As they were all lined up nice and neatly PC 2 sucked in PC 1's hot air, and gave hotter air to PC 3.

    Anyone guess what happened about 30 minutes after they were turned on for the first time?

    1. pmb00cs

      Re: Reminds me of my college days

      Same thing that happened to the very expensive Cisco Catalyst 6509 Chassis' at the end of a row of newly built out data hall where the installers of the racks couldn't be bothered to fit the dividing panels between the racks as it clearly wasn't important. Most rack mount servers, and top of rack switches, of the time took cold air in the front, and output the now rather warmer air out the back. The larger switches however, were designed to fit in wider racks to accommodate the cabling and thus were designed to take cold air in one side, and exhaust it out the other (the rack was meant to have baffles to direct the air up from underneath to the intake side, and up out the top from the exhaust side, but these were also not fitted).

      But that one wasn't my fault.

  26. Nick Pettefar

    WaveLAN

    I worked at NCR in “New Wigan” near Utrecht in the early 90s where they were testing the new WaveLAN WiFi cards. I was writing test software. They were getting figures for MTBF and needed to heat stress the cards in situ. They could fit four of them into an NCR PC and had I think four PCs full of cards in an open fire-safe running 24/7 with my software checking for failures (Pascal and assembler I think). Anyway, one night a cleaner must have been fed up of the noise and swung the fire-safe’s door shut. Next morning we discovered all the plastic in a pool at the bottom of the fire-safe. The cards had kept running for an impressive amount of time before the components started falling out of the PCBs when the solder melted.

  27. DenonDJ DN-2500F

    I got called to our Felixstowe office when a panic call came in saying all the PCs in a couple of rooms had stopped working. This was the room where all the trainee legals ( the sort you speak to for your "legal protection cover" on your car insurance ) worked.

    They'd decided to change the room layout like young people who are bored want to do do they'd unclipped all the cat5 cables ( no chance of structured cabling in a room designed for 3 but with 8 people in )

    In the process they had laid all the CAT5 cables across the top of a storage heater but failed to notice the signs saying do not cover,

    All the plastic on the cables had melted leaving strands of 4 twisted pairs and a nice acrid smell which no one claimed to notice !

  28. Binraider Silver badge

    In a certain bank that no longer exists where I used to work, the 415V switchboard was being shared by floor-to-ceiling cardboard from our NT4 to XP desktop replacements. As in, could not open the doors let alone swing a cat in there. It's as well the sites diesels weren't needed or else we'd have needed more than new PCs.

    1. Giles C Silver badge

      I once walked into a comms room which the facilities people had filled with pallets of soft drinks, to the extent that I couldn’t get to the kit I needed to look at.

      A few words were said and the bottles relocated to another location...

      Not as bad as cardboard but potentially worse for electrical kit.

  29. Stuart Castle Silver badge

    A few years ago, where I used to work, we had the students on our design and multimedia courses arrange an “end of year show”. With the idea we would

    Invite potential employers in and hopefully help the students get jobs. No idea whether it worked, but I digress.

    Students were given administrator rights over one computer (pc or Mac), which would be reimaged the day the show finished. They were also given access (within

    Reason) to any other equipment we owned that they would need.

    The morning after the first day of one of these shows, I was in one of our labs. I noticed that one of our then state of the start 24inch iMacs was running its fans at full speed (they normally run silently, but god do they get loud when the fans are at full speed).

    I went to the iMac. Found it still running the game the student had set it up for (something he’d designed himself). He’d also disabled all the power management (so the computer had been running at full speed with the screen on all night). Apparently in an effort to prevent our security or cleaning staff getting a free preview of his work, he’d left a sheet over the iMac.

    I took the sheet off, and braving the wave of heat coming off the computer, I turned that off and left it to cool down.

    When I turned the computer on, the image of the game was burned in to the screen. I know it’s an lcd rather than crt, so it wasn’t really burn in, but there was definitely a shadow of the game screen on the lcd and when we got our contractor in to repair it, they said the panel had been damaged and replaced it. At our cost, of course.

    Next year, after paying several hundred pounds to replace an lcd on a computer that was a few months old, the lab manager ruled that in future all computers in use for the end of year show would be turned off at closing time each time of the the show, and the students would be responsible for ensuring they were turned on again..

  30. shouldbworking

    Appropriate investment

    During my early career days I worked briefly at a startup. Their product could best be described as 'like ebay, but requires you to have large client software installed on your PC' - this in the days where 56k was the norm for a home user and a business might have splashed out on ISDN. This is just background to give an idea of how stupid the place was.

    Anyway, they were absolute skinflints - student placement developers mentored by fresh graduates, old equipment etc. One of the machines had an ailing PSU where the fan would not start spinning unless you poked through the grill to get it moving, after which it would be fine. You can see where this is going right? one day the usual stick for this task had fallen off the desk so a hapless employee grabbed the nearest thing to hand and gave it a jab. He used a teaspoon... one *POW * later he was sat on the other side of the room and the PSU was at last in peaceful, smoking retirement.

    Boss was incredibly angry that he'd have to spent £25 on a new PSU...

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